Record it. A phone or a cheap camera pointed at the door is the only honest witness, because the evidence left behind systematically under-reports quiet distress — the dog that shuts down leaves the room looking untouched.
Unless the dog leaves evidence behind, owners may be completely unaware anything is happening. The loud presentations — chewing, howling, toileting — are the ones that get noticed. Trembling, panting, hypersalivation, pacing and refusal to eat leave a tidy room behind them.
That is also why prevalence estimates disagree so widely between studies that depend on owner reports and studies that do not.
Three things, in this order. When the first sign appears, measured in seconds from the door closing — that number is your starting threshold. What the first sign is: for most dogs it is not the howling, it is a change in posture or a freeze. Whether it settles or escalates.
A dog that starts at forty seconds and settles by four minutes is a different training problem from a dog that starts at forty seconds and is still escalating at twenty minutes.
Anxiety in response to pre-departure cues is part of the clinical picture. Keys, shoes, the specific coat — for many dogs the panic is already running before the door opens, which means the door is not where the training starts.
If your footage shows the dog pacing while you are still putting your shoes on, the first absences you train are not absences at all. They are the shoes.
Why Your Dog Panics When You Leave is a 53-page guide in nine lessons, with every claim sourced in the margin of the page it sits on: finding your dog's threshold and protecting it, the training absence from one second upward, what crates and second dogs and bark collars actually do, and where medication fits. It comes with the Absence Ladder spreadsheet you log each departure in, and the owners' community.
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